Looks like Lauren Wilford, over at Filmwell, has been thinking about some of the same things. Here she is, passionately describing her gratitude for a new film that many of us might otherwise have overlooked.

I don’t think of myself as a person with a feminist axe to grind. Ruby Sparks touched a nerve, though, because it was a movie about the kind of anxiety that movies can give to women. It lodged itself in my brain because it told a story that had always been mine and had not been told, at least not in popular culture, at least not recently. As a creative, self-aware young woman growing into my identity – and as a girl who has spent most of her formative years in long-term relationships– I have struggled to name the thing that has kept me silent when I might have spoken, adrift when I might have dropped an anchor, anxious when I might have had rest. I believe it is that I have wanted to leave myself airy enough to be someone’s dream girl, porous enough to soak up someone else’s idea of me.

Zoe Kazan realizes that the dream girl is a cultural poison, and has she set out to do something about it. And for that I am eternally grateful. … The film is an unmistakeable assault on the conceit of the manic pixie dream girl.

Jeffrey Overstreet has relaunched a bigger, better version of this blog at LookingCloser.org. The new Looking Closer doesn't have any of the trashy click-bait advertisements that you're probably seeing all over this Patheos page. So give yourself a break.